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| The Lessons of Pinochet | After The Great Seattle Windstorm |
So Bush Created a Catastrophe
by Christopher Chantrill
December 15, 2006 at 3:29 am
WE ARE AT AN inflection point in the War on Terror. Three years of effort to produce democracy in Iraq after the 2003 invasion has demonstrated that the forces of chaos in Iraq are stronger than the move to democracy. “Bush Has Created a Catastrophe,” complains Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian.
Yes, of course. The Middle East is a catastrophe, and Bush created it. That was always understood as a possibility from the beginning.
Back in 2003, some unnamed Bushie said that the administration was throwing all the balls up in the air in the Middle East. He was right, and they have come down in a right mess.
So what? Suppose that Iraq is a catastrophe? What does that mean for us?
The answer is: Not much.
The first best outcome in the Middle East is for democracy to flourish. The next best outcome is for the Middle East to be divided between Sunni and Shia, and for the Sunnis under the leadership of Saudi Arabia to take up arms against the expansionist Shia of Iran.
The one thing we do not want is for the Middle East, its oil, and its oil money to be united under the control of a single murderous dictator.
The reason that progressives like Timothy Garton Ash are upset is that the War on Terror upsets the business-as-usual of the worldwide bureaucratic welfare state.
In the minds of progressives the story, er, the narrative, is supposed to go like this. Progressives discover a festing sore of inequality and oppression and write brilliant manifestos demanding its immediate remediation through the means of a bureaucratic government program funded by tax monies. Then everyone goes back to a life of writing works of creative intellectual brilliance punctuated by the occasional sexual adventure.
But this fantasy becomes impossible when there are young Muslim men running around the world blowing themselves up and beheading people. When that is happening, you must call up young western men of a martial disposition, furnish them with abundant materiel and leadership, and tell them to go at it.
And the progressives of the world hate that more than death itself.
Because they thought that, after a century of work, they had completely extinguished the martial instinct in the young men of North America and Europe.
Yes. They were wrong about that, too.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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